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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Mattogno's 'Riposte', 2013

Author: Jonathan Harrison

In December 2011, we published the first edition our White Paper, exposing MGK's dishonesty, antisemitism and fallacious reasoning concerning the Aktion Reinhard camps. One of our motives was to compel Mattogno to discuss documents that he had previously ignored or minimized. His contributions to MGK's 'riposte' of 2013 did discuss these documents at inordinate length, but primarily in a mode of obfuscation interspersed with blatant lying. I now turn to a detailed discussion of his Chapter 5 of that riposte.a) Double Standards of Interpretation

Mattogno is only able to maintain his approach by applying blatant double standards regarding whether to read a word or phrase in a document literally. A general pattern can be documented whereby, on the one hand, he treats euphemisms for killing as if they literally referred to resettlement, but then, on the other hand, he interprets literal killing words such as 'Vernichtung' and 'ausrottung' as cases of rhetoric, hyperbole and figurative language.

The tables below quantify such instances in Chapter 5 of MGK's 'riposte' to our White Paper. Table 1 gives several instances of euphemisms interpreted as resettlement:

"It is obvious
that the term annihilate (vernichten) did not
refer to an utter physical elimination of all the Aryan people in the world,
and so neither did the term exterminate (ausrotten) refer to a
complete physical destruction of the Jews."

Mattogno frequently quotes a long passage that includes a word or phrase that refers to extermination. These words or phrases often the fulcrum of the entire document's meaning. Mattogno then omits those key words or phrases from his interpretation. The following table lists examples from MGK's 'riposte'.

"The issue will be to
redirect the population to the Siberian areas. As railway transportation is
out of the question, this problem will also be an extremely difficult one."

192f.

Ciano diary

"It was impressive when he spoke about the
Russians eating each other and who have also eaten a German watch guard in a
prisoners of war camp. He did it with the utmost casualness. However he
showed heart and when he spoke about Udet and Mölders [two heroes of the
German air force], deceased in these days, tears appeared in his eyes."

203f.

Reichenau order

"Jewish Untermenschentum."

216

Stahlecker 6.8.41

“ruthless exploitation” that would produce “a significant easing of
the later transportation of Jews.”

“I prohibited the wild executions of Jews in Libau,
because in the way they were performed they were irresponsible. I ask
to inform me if your request of Oct. 31 is to be understood as a directive to
the effect that all the Jews in the Ostland are to be liquidated?";
and "Of course the clearing of the Ostland of the Jews is a predominant
task"

These omissions occur because Mattogno cannot fit them into the explanatory frameworks which he is hawking to his readers. For example, his framework for the USSR is that Jews were killed on the assumption they were Bolsheviks or partisans, whereas starvation was a necessary evil, embarked upon reluctantly, to supply the troops and homeland. Mattogno must therefore pretend that there was a realistic Siberia option in EC-126, which the sentence about rail transportation effectively rules out, and that there was a passage in Ciano's diary that was less callous than the one we cited in the White Paper, whereas in reality Ciano simply highlights Goering's "utmost casualness" and heartlessness when telling stories about starvation.

In his discussion of the Reichenau order, Mattogno even perverts the significance of the emphasis in the phrase "just atonement of Jewish Untermenschentum" by focussing on the word "just", as in fair, rather than on the clearly racist "Untermenschentum", meaning subhuman and unworthy of life. Mattogno somehow believes that Reichenau is here weighing up the moral merits of an execution rather than delivering a racist ideology. There is an strong undercurrent of antisemitism in this interpretation, given that it entertains the possibility that a whole race can be rightly found guilty of a crime.

His discussion of the USSR in August 1941 has to overlook clear references to working Jews to death that are contained in the Stahlecker and Rasch documents. Blindness to "death through labour" at this point is necessary for Mattogno because the formulation is repeated at Wannsee in the paragraph concerning the reduction of labour in the East.

His discussion of Lohse presumes that Lohse had no prior knowledge of extermination. However, this can only be sustained by ignoring the fact that Lohse was merely objecting to the manner in which the killings were done, and was also seeking clarification as to whether work Jews were still exempted from the executions, a fact made clear by Bräutigam's reply of 18th December that "Economic concerns shall generally be disregarded", which Mattogno falsifies on page 228 with the pathetic claim that "This does not necessarily refer to an extermination, but rather to an exclusion of the Jews from the economic life of the state."

c) Contradictory Accounts of Nazi Motives

Mattogno's contradictory interpretations of documents lead to bizarre assumptions concerning motive. For Soldau, he assumes that the Germans would literally evacuate 1,558 mental patients despite the fact he admits they operated a policy of euthanasia elsewhere. For the Bendorf-Sayn mental patients deported to Sobibor, Mattogno assumes they were literally sent to Izbica, despite that clearly being a camouflage destination (as shown by the fact that, in another cited Sobibor document, the transport reported by Fischmann was 'supposed' to terminate at Izbica but did not).

These tangles result from a deeper issue that all deniers cannot face, namely that the trajectory of Nazi policy made killing a far more plausible motive than resettlement. At a time when German soldiers were dying in large numbers in the East, and western bombs were falling on German cities, a regime that blamed Jews as a race for these events might be expected to wish to kill Jews as a race. Numerous statements made by senior figures after mid-1941 indicate this genocidal mindset being gradually radicalized, with Hitler referring to them as a "race of criminals" and Goebbels stating that "even the harshest punishment imposed upon them would still be too lenient."

Similarly, it is easier to see the Nazis escalating to killing rather than resettlement from the measures that Mattogno does admit the Germans attempted to pursue, namely the sterilization of work Jews and the killing of Soviet Jews who were living in pre-1939 Polish territory. Sterilization shows an intent initially to exterminate the Jews as a race within the current generation. Immediate extermination was therefore a quickening of the process towards this end goal, not a replacement for it. The killing of Soviet Jews begs the question as to why the Nazis would regard other Jewish populations as worthy of the right to survive, especially at the expense of the Germans having to guard and feed them in the East. This question-begging is increased by Mattogno's acceptance of the extermination of all but 1,000 Jews in Pinsk on 'military' grounds. If the military situation in late 1942 necessitated the extermination of Polesie Jews, why not all Polish Jews, and by extension, why not all European Jews, rather than resettling them in similar military regions? Indeed, Mattogno has so failed to join the dots that he regards the Pripet marshes as a resettlement site, despite their proximity to Pinsk and despite their being mentioned in the killing order that Mattogno cites.d) Repeating A Claim That Has Already Been Refuted

Mattogno shows a great deal of inconsistency and dishonesty in his interpretation of Greiser's use of the term “special treatment [Sonderbehandlung]” in his correspondence with Himmler, Koppe and Blome concerning Poles who had terminal tuberculosis. Sergey Romanov had already collected and posted all the links to scans and translations of each of these documents back in 2006 in this article, so we had these documents available to view for several years before Mattogno decided to distort them. Mattogno's deceptions proceeded in several stages. On the one hand, in MGK's book on Sobibor, Mattogno had conceded:

On 1st May 1942 (NO-246) Gauleiter Greiser proposed to Himmler to kill them, but on 18 November this problem was still being discussed (NO-249), and in the end these patients were not killed. (“The Medical Case,” op. cit. (note 828), pp. 759-794, “Project To Kill Tubercular Polish Nationals”), although it would have been easy to send them to Chelmno.

Greiser's letter (link) had begun with noting the on-going "special treatment of about 100,000 Jews in the area of my Gau" and then connected this same procedure to his proposal to deal with the incurable Poles. Mattogno did not quote this part of the letter in the Sobibor book because his concession that Greiser wanted to kill the Poles would have exposed the fact that Sonderbehandlung in relation to the 100,000 Jews also meant the killing of those Jews. Mattogno therefore in Sobibór appears to have accepted the proposed killing of the Poles, as a kind of mercy killing, but disconnected it from the Sonderbehandlung of Jews.

However, in his study of Chelmno (link), Mattogno adopts a different tactic. To deflect the connection between Sonderbehandlung and killing, Mattogno claims on page 31 that "This “special treatment” was merely an extension to the Jews in Warthegau [sic] of the order that Hitler had sent to Greiser on 28 September 1941, concerning the expulsion of the Jews of the Reich proper and the Protectorate via the ghetto of Lódz during “next spring,” that is, spring 1942." In other words, Mattogno here insisted that Sonderbehandlung referred to a territorial solution, namely resettlement to a reservation. Mattogno must therefore by extension have been claiming that the treatment of tubercular Poles would also have been a resettlement, despite his concession in Sobibór that "Greiser proposed to Himmler to kill them."

Pages 116-117 of our White Paper showed that this resettlement interpretation of Sonderbehandlung made no sense because the other documents in the Medical Case sequence cited by Mattogno clearly show the word Sonderbehandlung being used as an alternative to a territorial solution. To prove this, we cited Blome's letter of November 18, 1942 (link), which states:

Therefore, something basic must be done soon. One must decide the most efficient way in which this can be done. There are three ways to be taken into consideration:

1. Special treatment of the seriously ill persons.

2. Most rigorous isolation of the seriously ill persons.

3. Creation of a reservation for all TB patients.

Mattogno has therefore read our clear refutation of his argument yet he simply repeats it on page 274 of his riposte by stating that, in the letter of Blome, "the isolation of the sick Poles within a specially designated area was considered as a “Sonderbehandlung.”" He has therefore ignored or entirely misread the Blome letter, or is lying about its contents.

Moreover, Mattogno distorts other features of this documentation. Greiser's letter of November 21 (link) states that Sonderbehandlung can only take place after the whole population has been screened by an X-ray-battalion to identify those cases which are incurable. This makes no sense if the diagnosed incurables were simply to be sent to a special territory alongside the other patients before any screening had taken place, as Himmler states in his reply. The screening was clearly intended to identify those who would be killed, therefore Sonderbehandlung here must have meant killing. Incredibly, Mattogno does not discuss Greiser's letter of November 21 in the section that addresses the other documents in the Greiser-Himmler-Blome-Koppe chain that discusses the tubercular Poles. Instead, he shunts the document into a later section in which he pretends that Greiser's letter only refers to Blome's objections concerning "the problem of the extension of the euthanasia operation to persons who did not have the German citizenship." This is a blatant deception because Blome's letter, and thus Greiser's response, clearly equates the proposed Sonderbehandlung with euthanasia:

I could imagine that the Fuehrer, having some time ago stopped the program in the insane asylums, might at this moment consider a "special treatment" of the incurably sick as unsuitable and irresponsible from a political point of view. As regards the Euthanasia Program it was a question of people of German nationality afflicted with hereditary diseases. Now it is a question of infected sick people of a subjugated nation.

Greiser's response never refers to euthanasia; it only refers to objections made by Blome to the proposed Sonderbehandlung action. Blome was simply using the euthanasia controversy in Germany as a parallel to what may occur in Poland. Mattogno is therefore simply lying by claiming that Greiser was responding to a euthanasia issue separately from the Sonderbehandlung of the Poles.

Moreover, Greiser's letter of November 21 states "I personally don`t think, that we have to consult the Führer again in this matter, all the more since he told me at the last interview concerning the jews, that I should act according to my own judgement." This can only be a reference to Hitler giving Greiser permission to kill Jews. Mattogno attempts to blur this fact in two ways: by splitting this letter from Greiser's May 1 letter, and by claiming that Greiser is referring to a time period later than that which corresponds to the opening of Chelmno. The second ploy is as false as the first, because Greiser does not state when his "last interview" took place. Even if it was after Chelmno opened, Hitler's permission could have referred specifically to the killing of the Reich Jews, which commenced later than that of the Polish Jews.

Mattogno's statement in Sobibór was also wrong to claim, of the tubercular Poles, that "it would have been easy to send them to Chelmno" because this ignores the fact that Himmler had rejected the proposal on the grounds that the technology to screen the incurable Poles in order to separate them from other patients was not yet ready.

In summary therefore, Mattogno commits multiple deceptions with this documentation, including the repetition of claims already refuted by our White Paper, because Mattogno needs to bury the linkage between the killing of 100,000 Jews in the Warthegau and the proposal to kill tubercular Poles.

e) Setting False Goalposts

Mattogno repeatedly distorts the nature of Nazi orders and when they had to be given. He shows no cognizance of the literature that discusses how Hitler was able to encourage exterminatory designs to be produced from below without himself issuing written orders. He ignores, for example, the citation we gave in our White Paper concerning how Brandt and Bouhler obtained Hitler’s verbal authorization for extralegal abortions. He never acknowledges the ways in which leaders can give a "green light" to a murderous proposal in a way that gives them plausible deniability, and he evades the fact that Hitler needed such deniability due to the controversy over euthanasia, for which he had given a written order.

He compounds this fault with crass insistences that orders must be issued at every stage of a process, such as his claim that there had to be Hitler orders issued that correspond with Hoess's reference to a summer 1941 'decision' and Wisliceny's reference to an order transmitted by Himmler to Eichmann in April 1942 implementing extermination but exempting working Jews. This is flatly wrong on several counts. Firstly, it has been shown that Hoess mistakenly dated his evidence to summer 1941 when the events to which he refers must have taken place in 1942. Secondly, as was noted above, Wisliceny's testimony from prison in Bratislava stated that the original Fuehrer decision to exterminate the Jews was made just after the declaration of war against the USA in December 1941 and that Himmler later added the labour exemption. Mattogno thus fails epically to connect two Wisliceny testimonies despite having read them both.

Such false setting of goalposts is also evident in Mattogno's treatment of shootings. He states on page 176 of the 'riposte' that all documented shootings of Jews must be "performed against Jews for being Jews, and not for other contingent reasons." This is crass and absurd because it ignores the reality that the Nazis were carrying out the extermination alongside the task of trying to win a global war and had to plan accordingly, so shootings could encompass war aims as well as antisemitic ones. It also ignores the fact that Jews could be shot in fulfillment of quotas, such as occurred in Serbia. Moreover, the first edition of our White Paper repeatedly stated that there were goals aimed at the entire Soviet population, such as starvation planning, that nonetheless placed Jews at the front of the queue as part of a political economy of racial value. Such contingency is always a feature of genocides anywhere in the world: Mattgno's formula would necessitate the denial that genocide has ever occurred, because no genocide ever occurs purely for a racial motive "and not for other contingent reasons."f) Failing to Connect and Correctly Interpret Related Pieces of Evidence

On February 24, 1942, Hitler made a speech in which he stated that “through this war, Aryan humankind will not be annihilated, but the Jew will be exterminated.” This was reported the following day in The Front newspaper, in the phrase "Am Ende dieses Krieges wird die Ausrottung des Judentums stehen." In his diary entry of April 27, 1942, Goebbels recorded a similar threat by the Führer, who stated that “the hardest punishment that one can impose upon [the Jews] is still too lenient.”

Mattogno denies on page 360 of the 2013 riposte that the term "Aryan humankind will not be annihilated" is a reference to physical extermination of all Aryans, despite the fact that he acknowledges on pages 522-523 that "the Germans believing in this story responded accordingly" to the book "Germany Must Perish" by Theodore N. Kaufmann, which proposed “a comprehensive plan for the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people.” Mattogno seems to be asking us to believe that Hitler did not believe Kaufmann's threat was serious, nor indeed that the threat alone was suffiecient provocation to justify an exterminatory response.

g) Omission of Key Paragraphs

Failure to connect crucial documents is often combined with omission of key paragraphs from documents that form part of the chain of proof. This is most evident in how Mattogno deals with the treatment of Reich Jews deported to Minsk. Mattogno firstly blatantly lies about the reasons why transports were suspended at the end of November 1941: "In reality, as is well documented, the opposition to these transports resulted only from the disastrous conditions prevailing in Minsk at the time." He simply ignores the reason given by Braemer on November 20th, namely that "The influx of German Jews, far superior in intelligence to the bulk of the Belorussian population constitutes a severe danger for the pacification of White Ruthenia."

Mattogno then lies about Kube's letter to Lohse of December 16, 1941, by claiming that "The killing of the deportees was therefore a mere possibility, dictated by a sort of euthanasia policy." This is clearly false because Mattogno's own chosen translation of Kube's letter states:

Is the slaughter to be carried out by the Lithuanians and Letts, who are themselves rejected by the population here? I couldn’t do it. I beg you to give clear directives [in this matter], with due consideration for the good name of our Reich and our Party, in order that the necessary action can be taken in the most humane manner.

Mattogno pretends that Kube was asking for clarification of whether the Jews would be killed, but the text clearly shows that he is asking for clarification of how they would be killed, and by whom. It refers to killing as "the necessary action," not "a mere possibility."

However, Mattogno then makes the crucial concession that documents authored by Hofmann and Kube on January 29 and February 6 did indeed refer to killing, but he gives an implausible reason:

I accept the intention appearing in the two documents mentioned above to kill the Jews deported from the Reich. The above examined documents show that is was a local initiative dictated by circumstances, but this stands in contrast to the alleged Hitler order of total extermination of mid-December 1941.

This appeal to "local initiative" ignores the fact that the central authorities in Berlin clearly knew that they planned to send 25,000 Jews to place that could not accommodate or feed them, as clearly shown in the text that Mattogno himself quotes from Kube's letter referring to the fact that "It is not possible to suddenly accommodate 25,000 people in a destroyed city." The centre clearly did not stumble blindly into a scenario that would have necessitated the killing of most of the 25,000 deportees had the suspension of transports not occurred.

Mattogno then commits multiple dishonesties in his treatment of Kube's report to Lohse of July 31. He gives the impression that he is quoting the whole of the document in the text that he quotes on pages 345-346 of the Riposte, taken from pages 192-193 of NMT IV. However, Mattogno's quotation stops abruptly, with no explanation, at the words "cease to exist." He thus omits the remainder of that paragraph, and the whole of the following paragraph, which are crucial to the document's meaning:

I myself and the SD would certainly much prefer that the Jewish population in the district general of White Ruthenia should be eliminated once and for all when the economic requirements of the Wehrmacht have fallen off. For the time being, the necessary requirements of the Wehrmacht who is the main employer of the Jewish population are still being considered. The clear anti-Jewish attitude of the SD and the difficult task of the units in White Ruthenia to deliver again and again new Jewish transports from the Reich to their destination, both put an undue strain on the physical and spiritual strength of men of the SD and diverts them from their real purpose, which lies in the White Ruthenian region itself.

I should therefore be grateful if the Reich Commissioner could see his way to stop further Jewish transports until the partisan threat has finally been overcome. I must make 100 percent use of the SD against partisans and against the Polish Resistance Movement, both of which demand the use of the full strength of the SD units, which are none too strong as it is.

This is crystal clear and unambiguous about the killing of Jews in two ways. Firstly, the personnel of the SD were suffering undue stress from their role in the killing process. The passage can have no other plausible meaning, unless Mattogno would like us to believe that brave SD men would suffer "an undue strain on [their] physical and spiritual strength" when they delivered a train to a terminal. Secondly, there were no units available for dealing with transports because they were needed "100 per cent" for anti-partisan actions. This would clearly rule out their use in resettlement actions east of Minsk.

The passages Mattogno does quote also cause him severe problems that he ignores. Most of the 3,500 Reich Jews killed in the Grossaktion of July 28-29 were from the 7,000 deported in the Autumn, leaving only 2,600 remaining in the ghetto. This leaves a huge hole where those deported in the second wave seem to be absent from the ghetto population. If these had been transported east, why weren't the 3,500 Reich Jews shot on July 28-29 transported east with them instead of being shot? If the second wave deportees were not transported east, where were they located, if not killed?

We have already shown above, in the discussion of tubercular Poles, the lengths to which Mattogno will go to distort the use of Sonderbehandlung. His use of the term is inconsistent, because occasionally he concedes its use in shooting contexts, but his evasions are otherwise perverse. For example, he deflects the use of Sonderbehandlung by Mueller in reference to the shooting of 630 Jews in Minsk by citing a document that refers to a request for special treatment in the form of financial assistance by the Evangelical Lutheran Church. A church is clearly not a human being so it is a pure diversion to regard this reference as a comparable example of usage.

A more flagrant diversion occurs with regard to the proposals to kill non-working Rumanian Jews. We cited Luther's letter noting that:

Starting on 10.9.1942, it is intended to bring the Jews from Romania to the Lublin district, where the portion fit for work will be employed, and the rest is to undergo special treatment.

Mattogno accuses us falsely of not knowing the document and then cites a section of his beloved Luther memo:

The German legation Bucharest reports to D III 602 g that the Romanian government leaves it up to the Reich government to deport their Jews together with the German Jews into the ghettos to the East.

However this memo does not contradict the earlier document because the selection procedure Luther describes could have taken place after the arrival in the ghettos. Moreover, even if the language in the memo referred to a genuine belief in resettlement eastwards, this belief would not be Luther's because Luther is here simply paraphrasing a report from the German legation Bucharest, which was operating from a different level of knowledge than Luther's or was using appropriate camouflage.

The selective use of Luther's documents is also related to how Mattogno perverts the meaning of the Wannsee Protocol. There are four features of the Protocol that Mattogno omits or distorts. Firstly, the Protocol is silent on the fate of non-working Jews. Given that the document claims to be concerned with resettlement, this is a case where silence implies intent to kill. Secondly, the fate of the working Jews also makes this inference the only plausible one:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

Mattogno perversely interprets 'if released' to mean the freeing of a person from confinement, when infact there is a clear implication that the only way to guarantee no Jewish revival is to kill the remnant. Moreover, "treated accordingly" converges with the meaning of Sonderbehandlung that Heydrich had been using since 1939, and with his statements during 1941 such as the sifting described in Einsatzbefehl 8 and his stated preference to send Jews to "camps built by the Bolsheviks." Fourthly, Mattogno ignores the implication of the sentence, "SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann advocates the opinion that sterilization will have to be widely used, since the person of mixed blood who is given the choice whether he will be evacuated or sterilized would rather undergo sterilization." This clearly implies a shared knowledge that evacuation was a fatal measure.

Finally, Mattogno ignores the sentence that "State Secretary Dr. Bühler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action." This shows that the final solution regarding Jews from the General Government was to take place within the General Government. Frank and Bühler knew that Jews would be eliminated without leaving Poland.

Mattogno is equally clueless on the exterminatory content of the statements that followed Wannsee. On March 27, 1942, Goebbels revealed the fate of the non-working Jews, whilst also repeating The Wannsee Protocol’s formulation for the workers:

The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously.

Mattogno would have his readers believe that the words "pretty barbaric procedure" referred merely to evacuations over the Bug. To do this, Mattogno simply expunges the only rational interpretation of the word "liquidated" that can be applied to a population of human beings. Mattogno commits a similar fallacy by choosing to adopt Butz's reading of Himmler's "keine Liquidierung" in relation to the transport was killed in Riga in November 1941:

Butz opined that the expression “keine Liquidierung” “applies to the transport itself, so that the liquidation is to be understood in the sense of ‘cancellation’ or ‘disbandment’ of the transport.” This was likely justified, since the first five transports directed to Riga were redirected to Kauen due to logistical difficulties, while the one of 30 November 1941 was the first to reach Riga.

This is clearly absurd as there is simply no dictionary usage that equates liquidate to cancel. Similarly, one does not 'disband' a transport. Moreover, Mattogno had previously, in his review of Denying History (link), accepted that Liquidierung referred to killing in this document but claimed that "only certain individuals with contagious diseases were killed in individual cases", citing the sentence from the Einsatzgruppe A report of January 1942 that "In rare cases, contagious Jews have been removed and shot, under the pretext of taking them to a clinic or a Jewish hospital." However, this is a sleight of hand with timelines because Einsatzgruppe A was referring to a situation that pertained after Himmler had reprimanded Jeckeln and suspended the shooting of Reich Jews due to its political sensitivity at that time.

Mattogno similarly has a problem with the briefing of Rosenberg of November 18, 1941. Mattogno claims:

Beyond the mention of the destination of the Jewish deportations, it
is worth mentioning here the purely figurative meaning of “Ausmerzung
des Judentums” (extirpation of Jewry); even with the connotation of
“biologische Ausmerzung” (biological extirpation): it designated the
eradication of Jewry from the soil of the Reich and from the European
soil.

This is again false because Rosenberg's actual formulation was "it is necessary to expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way." Rosenberg therefore saw pushing over the Urals as a measure that would also bring about biological extermination through the incredibly harsh conditions the Jews would encounter in the expulsion. The proposed evacuation was not therefore any less lethal than direct killing.

6 comments:

Here's how Mattogno began the 2.5 pages (pp. 179-181) he devoted to answering you on just this particular point:

"This document of course does contain chilling remarks on the prospective death by starvation of millions of people; indeed, in that sense Harrison might have found even more striking passages in it to quote from. Rather than evidence for the notion that, as Harrison puts it, “death was at the forefront of Nazi intentions for the Soviet population, with Jews at the front of the queue” (p. 95), what in fact emerges from a reading of the full document, however, is something quite different:"

Why have you chosen not to address what Mattogno did write in response to you on this matter?

As I said in the introduction, this is a preview, not a full response. My full notes for this document are:

"M ignores the fact that transport to Siberia was explicitly ruled out in a passage M actually quotes. According to the doc's own formulation, this leaves on the table only the mass dying of millions. M then falsifies our own position by stating these deaths would be merely callous and necessary for the war effort, not "death for its own sake". We never claim that starvation planning was "death for its own sake."

The omission of no transports to Siberia has obvious implications for the future resettlement of Jews as of May 1941. They won't be moved to Siberia on trains but will be shoved out by other means, which essentially means a Trail of Tears kind of genocide, even as of the May 1941 planning stage. Clearly Mattogno would want to suppress that and present the foreseen deaths as an unfortunate by-product of military and economic operations, rather than the planned deaths by neglect of tens of millions of a surplus population.

Hi, There is another epic fail from MGK in adressing the Greiser-Himmler correspondance over what to do with Polish people with tuberculosis: the Wilhelm Hagen letter to Hitler from 7th december 1942 (that the HC team had cited): it is a smoking, no, a firing gun proving that the "special treatment" hypothesis for those Polish people is murder, explicitely mentionned by Hagen as beeing what happens to Jews. It both proves that Jews are beeing murdered en masse and that "Special Treatment" is murder...

In MGK's blob, the Hagen letter is very carefully NOT examined from the Greiser-Himmler affair point of view. There is indeed some evasion about it, but from another perspective (always carefully uncorrelated to any other) on page 551-552. MGK carefull not to remind anyone it should be read in the the context of the Greiser-Himmler exchange... How pathetic.

Guess you would have pointed to that anyway.

Great job about how euphemisms are systematically litteraly taken and how clear and violent vocabulary is systematically downgraded as exageration or strong imagery.